With so many code-bases and their children, so to speak, one wonders which codebase would be the best for prolonged, extremely-featured play?

I certianly wish to have stats, skills, and so forth, but I'm also interested in being able to have many, varying, and reliable special commands, as well as a number of encompassing special effects. You know, the ones where "PC jumps into a vat of tar".

I have heard of LPC, and even seen the code, and I know that the builders can add things into the room themselves. In ROM, Circle, etc, you'd need a coder to implement these special features. The difference, in this aspect, it appears, is that in LPC, the builders ARE coders, while in C-based code, the builder simply uses tools.

I highly recommend the Dawn of Time codebase as a good stepping stone at least to what your looking for, It was the easiest way to get a type of feel I wanted. It was like a ROM+++++. It came with a highly advanced OLC including:

As you can just see from the OLC it implements an herbalism system as well as religions.

With a weird 'game-edit' feature you can pretty much (through a simple interface) change many of the usual 'deep in the code things'. And on a technical side it has stuff like hotreboot (lets you reboot without bringing the game down), integrated web-server, etc.

From what I understand, but never really got into, it allows for the creation and editing of skills and spells through the game. Probably simpler things as it seems to rely on a template, but great for the non-coders.

Then the great and wonderful 'short-desc' feature to add that touch of realism. Subduing instead of killling, letter writing, the ability to bury and uncover items in appropriate places, tracks, trails, tracking,...

and this is just a handful of features. Its a VERY versatile codebase for what your getting. Its probably not as adaptable as like LP (which I've never tried) but for the size (which is small) and the simplicity and intuitiveness to use and change its truely worth checking out.

My only gripe is that its level-based, but from talking with several people that use it, they say they have successfully switched out of this, but you'd probably have to talk to them about that.